Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Botgirl Does It Madmen Style

I spent about forty hours of my December vacation watching five seasons of Mad Men. It made me realize that that my blogging ennui was mostly due to the fact that I didn't have a cool opening video. No. Not really. But the process of creating my own version of the iconic Mad Men motion graphics was incredibly satisfying.

It would have been a much less fulfilling experience if I'd have slammed it out in a couple of days and posted the first full draft. That's exactly what would have happened if I wasn't on a self-imposed publishing moratorium. I would have visualized the concept of replacing the businessman with Botgirl and stopped there. Instead, I refined the video through multiple iterations over the course of a few weeks.

The initial challenge was figuring out how to recreate the look and feel of the falling character and stylized set. I set up a single building in Frameforge, textured it with a couple of my Second Life images, and captured a mono-color character falling from a few different angles. I loved the first draft, but it was little more than a proof of concept.

Over the next couple of weeks I went through a dozen iterations: I added red hair, nails and high hails to the character; created additional buildings; added new animations and shots; added the opening sequences in the office; created a cover version of the theme song in GarageBand; experimented with different filter looks; and finally added the closing shot of the reclining figure. After exporting the animation, I did a quick edit to the original RJD2 music theme.

Although I could certainly refine it even more, I'm very happy with the current version and decided it was done for now.